Smoke Signals

The Importance of an Efficient Website

Most business owners in Houston spend a lot of time in their cars. You probably don’t spend the same amount of time learning and understanding how your website is designed. To understand website design a little better, we would like to share with you some parallels between your car and your website.

Re-designing websites is like fixing car problems. If you have a fender bender, you may only need to fix the body of your car. If your car isn’t running right, you may need to make some changes under the hood. The visual part of your website is like the body of your car. The backend code of your website is what’s under the hood. When you ask someone to “redesign your website” this may seem to be a visual design change only, but actually there are two different parts to the design and they have to work together to keep your website running. When working with a graphic design team, they should have experts to work on both the visual aspects and the source code work.

One of our recent challenges was with a new client, Martin Company. Martin Company is an electrical engineering firm that wanted a website redesign. They had already worked extremely hard under the hood of the website for their ranking in the search engines. They didn’t want that to change. This presented a challenge, but we were up for it.

As you know in your business, your search engine ranking is extremely important. One wrong move can shift your competition ahead of you in the rankings. Luckily our designers were familiar enough with the unique coding under the hood of their website to make the visual changes needed without affecting the search engine results. When your car is running great, but you need a new paint job, you don’t go to a mechanic; you go to a body shop. In this scenario, Tribe Design is the body shop.

With Martin Company’s website re-design, they wanted a unique and interactive element to engage potential customers when they viewed the site. Since the longtime industry standard for building these elements had been in Adobe Flash, the trend nowadays says it is no longer the case. Have you ever pulled up a website on your mobile device and you are unable to see some, or all, of its contents? Most likely that is because the website was created in Flash, which is not mobile compatible. Some visitors will experience the same mobile incompatibility issues and could possibly mean a missed business opportunity. Because we wanted all audiences to have the ability to view their website, we chose an alternative interactive design technique that is mobile friendly. Here’s some feedback from a Martin Company partner.

“The website is great!! As somebody not in the industry, my brain automatically thinks ‘electrical engineering’ instead of ‘electronics.’ I have clients with $50 million plus in revenues whose websites couldn’t touch yours. Lots of details for Underwriters, Prospects (or anyone trying to do business you.) Especially like the cool “Geo-tagging Camera.””

Marcus E. Battle – Alpha Omega Insurance Group, LP

If you have a great spot in the search rankings, but aren’t receiving raving reviews about how your site looks and operates, we can help. Have you tried to pull your website up on your mobile phone? Do you like the way it looks? If not, it’s time to make a change.

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